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Edited on Wed Aug-23-06 07:49 PM by arendt
Joe the Zombie Democrat by arendt
I used to laugh at the horror/slasher movie trope of the clueless victims, who don't understand that their lives are in immediate danger. So did the audience, as in the first "Alien" movie, when Harry Dean Stanton is bemusedly looking for a lost cat with a monster roaming the ship.
I'm not laughing anymore. Middle class America is in a real-life horror movie; yet it cluelessly goes about its daily routine - naively trusting the media, the government, the process. "Nobody would want to hurt me" is the thinking of these soon to be deceased. But enough said about the victims, this essay is about the monsters.
The monsters in our case are a species of zombies, animated corpses. The scientific explanation for the zombie genre has never been very strong, but the emotional impact has been tremendous. In addition to the "Living Dead" trilogy, the genre contains "28 Days", and the lighter-hearted "Shawn of the Dead". As long as you don't ask for a convincing explanation of what brought the corpses back to life, the corpses' shambling mayhem will make your skin crawl.
Today, in America, zombies roam out of control in our government and our media; and all they want is living flesh to feed themselves. Not literally, like in Night of the Living Dead (NOTLD); but figuratively, as in: they want your money, your house, your livelihood, anything that can be reduced to cash value. They want to devour the middle class, right now; and they will commit economic violence to do so. After all, just like in a horror movie, the cops are nowhere to be seen. You can't call them; they just don't answer. In fact, some of them are zombies too.
In our case, its easy to explain the animating force behind the zombie invasion: money; pots and pots of money. First it animated the zombie hatemongers: Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Medved. Next, it animated the zombie takeover of the GOP. At the same time, it captured part of the Democratic Party, the DLC.
The most poignant moment of a zombie flick (if such flicks can be poignant) is when a loved one dies and instantly comes back as a zombie. The still-living partner gets to choose whether to dismantle the animated corpse or be killed by it. Another variant has the victim "lose set" and get done in by the corpse; e.g., the scene in NOTLD where the just-killed child zombie stabs her parents in the back with a pinking shear as they battle other zombies.
Joe Lieberman just presented the Democratic Party with a pinking shears moment. He claimed to be a Democrat, but the minute he got politically dead, he reanimated as a Republican and started trashing his own party. We always suspected it, but now we know for certain: Joe is a money-grubbing zombie. He grubs for insurance money and pharmaceutical money and defense contractor money. But, like the parents of the child zombie in NOTLD, some middle-class Democrats can't believe their old friend is now slavering to kill them.
Let me make some facts perfectly clear to genuine members of the Democratic Party. First, in this election, a vote for Joe Lieberman is a vote for George Bush. The GOP have pulled their tarnished punching bag of a candidate and are advising, fund-raising, and propagandizing for Joe. Joe is, as David Sirota says, "the de facto GOP candidate".
Second, a Democratic politician who refuses to condemn Lieberman and strip him of his seniority is an enabler of the GOP; plain and simple. This is like the moment in "They Live", where the camoflague machine is destroyed and all the aliens in high positions are revealed.
Given the inability of most corporately-brainwashed Americans to directly and rationally understand the threat of corporate zombies like Joe, maybe re-packaging movies they get with "their gut" is a way to break through the brainlessness. Otherwise, we are all zombie-chow.
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